Alberta Business Marketing

Today most CEOs are faced with many questions regarding Social Media. What is the ROI? Is it worth investing in? What are the tangible benefits? A lack of a persuasive business case and contradicting information has resulted in some inertia with regard to investing in the space.

The prevailing opinion is that social media is a free marketing channel that is good for sharing information but has little consequence on reputation and business results. It is important to distinguish between social media and social networking. Social media is content created by people using publishing technologies. Social networking is focused on building online communities with shared interests and activities. It is also important to understand how users engage in social communities. The 90-9-1 Principle of “participation inequality” applies here- 1 percent of people create content, 9 percent edit or modify that content, and 90 percent view the content without contributing.

There is some good news. Those CMOs who have adopted Social Media successfully have used carefully crafted strategies that are aligned with their corporate business plans to cover three broad areas: increasing employee engagement, engaging customers and prospects and strengthening the company’s reputation. CMOs must consider some important facts about Social Media:

Engage employees

Here are some surprising insights from the 2011 Arcus Employee Engagement Research Report. Only 20 percent of employees are engaged with their organizations, the remaining are actively disengaged. Moreover, managers rank internal communication problems as the top barrier to productivity. 55 percent of employees feel they work in silos and only 28 percent of employees say their companies are effective in communicating with them. Social media can help. Here are three steps you can take to address these gaps:

• Create a “You Ask, We Answer” Forum. A key tool used by CEOs to leverage social media is to open a highly transparent two-way communication channel with employees. A “You Ask, We Answer” forum hosted on the company’s Intranet will enable employees to post questions with an anonymous post option. The response time is important. A 24 hour turn around will increase employee confidence and also demonstrate that the channel is important to the management team. Mandating an answer to every question also reinforces the transparency of the channel. The benefits of the Intranet Q&A strategy includes a deeper understanding among employees of the corporate strategy, the challenges faced by the company and how employees can help with a shared decision making process.

• Recognize Performance. A second strategy is to use the Internal channel to recognize outstanding employee performance. A monthly recognition program with an outline of the case that led to the award can inspire employees to find new and innovative ways to solve problems.

• Empower employees to blog. The third strategy for the Intranet would be to encourage Employee blogs. This allows employees to share ideas, knowledge and solutions within the organization. A scan of these ideas may allow the company to tap into new strategies to increase client satisfaction and solve problems that may otherwise not be apparent. Employee blogs also allows quick insights into departments and issues such as gaps in employee development, leadership issues or product sales related challenges.

Engage customers and prospects

• Define your social networking strategy. A good strategy is focused on sharing useful content that is of interest to your network of customers, employees and partners. A good strategy will also allow you to identify success points in your social media plan and leverage information that can position your company as a leader and innovator. A key driver of the process is a continuous and ongoing stream of relevant information that we call a “drip strategy”.

• Engage your contacts. Most of us have a presence on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Few of us really understand how to leverage the platform. Leading social media users will tell you that it isn't about the number of connections, it is more about the quality of connections. A good gauge is to ask if your connections would recommend your company or your work. A higher percentage of recommenders means your social strategy is working harder for you.

• Foster a community. Your sites should promote active participation and foster a community as part of an enhanced shopping experience. This is facilitated by a high level of social interaction and consumer-driven content that support the shopping experience and deliver superior value to the customer. A community can be a valuable asset to help your customer support team solve problems quickly and efficiently. Fans of your company can connect directly with other customers and offer solutions that could strengthen customer satisfaction.

Strengthen your social commerce strategy

• Focus on destination branding. Making your brand a destination is likely to drive your social commerce strategy. Create a channel to listen to what your customers are saying and respond and act quickly to criticism. Our research shows that customers can be a valuable source of feedback on satisfaction drivers and their input can dramatically increase sales. The approach allows more informed decisions about social commerce strategies and improvement of the customer experience. A key measure of success is how many of your customers become your advocates.

• Monitor online conversations. It is critical to monitor in-market conversations about your brand and products. A better understanding of the tone of conversations can provide valuable indicators of the value your brand delivers to customers. A good social media strategy will include metrics that provide insights on activity, sentiment, share-of-market, and themes of online conversations. Thought leaders who are also prolific bloggers are closely monitored. With a sound impact measurement strategy, companies will be able to assess the return on social media investments and also offer benchmarks for ongoing social media activities. Companies can use analytics tools such as our Reputation Analysis and Management Tool for a real time, on-demand and in-depth understanding of the reputation of their brand on the Web. An advanced analytics tool searches, tags, and indexes topics on the Web. It can filter thousands of online content sites and identifies relevant brand and reputation information by applying discovery tools that interpret content trends and provide deeper visibility into impacts on strategies and sales.

• Leverage key social networking tools. Explore emerging trends in social media tools such as Widgets (portable carts (e.g., zazzle.com) and brand engagement (e.g., lemonade.com), social bridging (enable shoppers to log into e-commerce sites without a registration ID) and Mobile Social Networking Applications (allow users to access social networks from their smartphones). These cutting edge tools create seamless interfaces with customers and your brand. They encourage more frequent interaction and robust two way communication.

Benchmarking your social media strategy can provide surprising insights about where and how you need to recalibrate your approach. Email me for best practices from 1500 companies and viewpoints of CEOs on social media.

Merril Mascarenhas

Tags: Analytics/Measurement, Research, social media, Strategy
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Marketing is about engaging consumers. Or is it? Sometimes consumers can lead the process of engagement by becoming activists for a cause, an idea or a need. Today, marketing has shifted from “mass marketing” to “social marketing” to a new frontier I like to call “social activist marketing”. Some brands such as Lululemon have tapped into this emerging concept.

A teaching moment for marketers

The Occupy movement is different and could potentially become a teaching moment for marketers. As you see in the video below, produced on the one month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, most protesters don’t know where the movement is going or what it should achieve. And yet they are united by common themes and beliefs.

According to posts on Wikipedia, "The original protest began on September 17, 2011, and by October 9, similar demonstrations were either ongoing or had been held in 70 major cities and over 600 communities in the U.S. Internationally, other "Occupy" protests have modeled themselves after Occupy Wall Street, in over 900 cities worldwide.

A catchy 1% and 99% slogan certainly helps (My favourite- "The 1% have Addresses. The 99% have Messages"). There is even a claim that the protests were initiated by the Canadian activist group Adbusters.

Elevating the conversation

One lesson that resonates with me is the importance of elevating your conversation with consumers. Find a big theme that is above a specific need, want or desire. The theme represents a deep insight about a belief that needs to be unearthed. It is rare that campaigns dig that deep. Most focus on insights, benefits and product features. Our research indicates that campaign ideas that have withstood the test of time are based on basic beliefs that connect a group of consumers.

Merril Mascarenhas

Tags: Branding, social media
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Steve Jobs put a computer inside a phone that made it into 120 million pockets. He was a boundary breaking thinker and astute marketer. Apple stock increased over 1700% since 1980 to $378 in 2011. There are very few brands that can deliver such an astounding return on shareholder value. And very few companies generate so much revenue from just four product lines: Macs, iPhones, iPods and iPads.

Walter Isaacson wrote a 571-page biography of Jobs, which went on sale earlier this month. The book confirms what we know today: Jobs was focused on exploring new and interesting ways of doing things. There's even a Facebook page dedicated to WWSJD (What would Steve Jobs do?).

Here are three themes that marketers can use as guideposts when developing marketing strategies:

1. Get your thinking "clean to make it simple"

“Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end.”

We often hear about the need to “keep it simple” in marketing campaigns. But most marketing strategies don’t follow this principle. For example, in product development today, the emphasis is on new variants instead of original product ideas. A twist on keeping it simple is to start with a simple concept and stay true to the original brand idea. Jobs summed it up really well- “it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important”.

Steve Jobs told Fortune magazine in 2008, "Apple is a $30 billion company yet we've got less than 30 major products. I don't know if that's ever been done before". He went on to add:

"Certainly the great consumer electronics companies of the past had thousands of products. We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of many of the things we haven't done as the things we have done. The clearest example was when we were pressured for years to do a PDA, and I realized one day that 90% of the people who use a PDA only take information out of it on the road. They don't put information into it. Pretty soon cell phones are going to do that, so the PDA market's going to get reduced to a fraction of its current size, and it won't really be sustainable. So we decided not to get into it. If we had gotten into it, we wouldn't have had the resources to do the iPod. We probably wouldn't have seen it coming.”

“A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google and former Apple Board Member said in an article in Bloomberg Business Week, “One of the things about Steve is, he was always in the realm of possibility. There was a set of assumptions that Steve would make that were never crazy. They were just ahead of me.” He added, “he had a level of perception about feelings and emotions that was far beyond anything I’ve met in my entire life.”

At Arcus, we have found that the biggest insights and ideas come from observing and analyzing in real time how consumers interact with products in their daily lives. Jobs believed that technology can be a tool for individual definition and self-expression. A pink iPod is about much more than just listening to music. Simple insights can lead to great campaigns. This goes against conventional thinking about market research. Focus groups and quantitative research generate insights but these tools will never match the depth of understanding that observing feelings and emotions of people in real life situations can offer.

3. Anticipate surprising and completely new strategic directions

“Creativity is about connecting things.”

We live in a connected world. Interaction between brands and customers has never been more complex with so many touch points. However, some things never change. Good ideas are scarce. No matter how complex we think marketing has become, the most successful strategies tend to have a simple premise that captivates and delights audiences. Jobs' last advice to the new Chief Executive Officer of Apple Inc., Tim Cook, was to 'never ask what Steve would do'. He would suggest, ‘Just do what’s right’. He felt that followers tended to spend all their time thinking and talking about what someone else would do.

Merril Mascarenhas

Tags: Branding, Customer Experience, technology
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Empowering consumers to relate to a brand in their own personal way is the new horizon of innovation. Creating imaginative product ideas that allow consumers to explore, create and share is a new extension of real time co-creation. Brands can learn from these new co-creations and deploy new vectors of growth, based on new product ideas. The opportunities are endless.

Coca-Cola tested its Freestyle vending machines in 2009 and is rolling out the machines in the US this year. The machines offer consumers a touch-screen with an incredible 100+ different beverage choices ranging from Diet Cherry Coke to Dasani waters. Customers can even create their own combinations of flavours. Already, Coke lists a portfolio of more than 3,500 beverages, from diet and regular sparkling beverages to still beverages on its website.

In today’s mature markets, a popular strategy has been to take mass customization to the next level, to create highly personalized brand experiences for existing products. Coke has launched apps for social networks that allow consumers to create and name their own drinks. In the future, it may be possible for an app to create a bar code for a customized flavour that a vending machine can create.

Customization is driving collaborative consumption

The buzz word for C2C (Consumer to Consumer) commerce is 'collaborative consumption'. An example is Airbnb. Less than four years old since launch, the website provides accommodations in nearly 11,000 cities in 180 countries. According to Inc Magazine, Airbnb’s popularity has exploded recently, growing more than 800% last year. Airbnb reports it has booked 1.6 million night stays in other people’s homes to date. Airbnb allows its members to customize their vacaction accomodations based on a number of variables.

Five steps to deploy collaborative consumption

1. Explore surprising vectors of innovation of your products.
2. Define the relevance of these vectors. Which ones delight customers?
3. Create an experiential component to the brand. How will customers create unique experiences for themselves?
4. Create communication channels to allow customers to share ideas and innovations.
5. Stay true to the brand position. Look for innovations that reinforce the brand idea.

What other examples of mass customization are working for brands?

Tags: Branding, Customer Experience, Mobile
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Paying more for what you want is not looking so affordable — or sustainable — anymore. Trading up was always a fragile phenomenon. But the context seems to have changed in the past two years. It rested, in large part, on consumer psychology — a feeling derived from self worth.

Masstige is in. Its prestige products available to the masses. Consumers want to connect emotionally with brands in categories where they expect quality, performance, and engagement. But in other categories that aren’t emotionally important, they become bargain hunters. For example, a passionate BMW driver will shop for store-brand groceries every weekend. Which one of these categories is your brand in?

A new emerging market segment called Masstige is growing at the expense of the premium segment in several product categories. Retail has seen a lot of activity in the Masstige space. 2008 and 2009 saw the introduction of new store concepts by the mainstream retailers, such as Murale by Shoppers Drug Mart and Oasis by Sears, while Sephora and Bath & Body Works continued their geographic expansion. Additionally, Yves Rocher introduced a new store concept that was well-received by customers.

This trend is notable in such products as skin and hair care, where Olay and TRESemmé positioned themselves directly against the premium segment, openly questioning the need to pay extra. There are many more successes - Coach persuaded women to buy $300 handbags when a $40 version from a value chain could have sufficed. Williams-Sonoma trained shoppers to covet a $50 stainless-steel hand-crank can opener, even though Wal-Mart sells a high-quality electric model for less than half the price.

The term Masstige was popularized by Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske in their book Trading Up and their Harvard Business Review article "Luxury for the Masses".

Why is this trend important to senior marketers? Democratization of brands is strongly associated with higher market share and margins. It drives value and makes brands more resilient. Plotting your brand in the continuum of Masstige hierarchies can reveal new insights on how to optimize brand value and strengthen pricing strategies.

Merril Mascarenhas

Tags: Branding, Customer Experience, Research, social media, Strategy
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